Monday, July 19, 2004

IDG News Service gets it wrong

notice right at the beginning how it says the new WinCE virus was designed to demonstrate security holes in the WinCE operating system? this is a subtle point, one that far too many people fail to grasp, but the ability of viruses to infect a platform has nothing to with security holes in that platform... virus infectability is a 'feature' of all general purpose computing platforms... *all of them*... you can't create a general purpose computing platform that isn't susceptible to viruses...

therefore you cannot (as the article's author does) infer security holes in an OS simply because the system is vulnerable to viral infection... it's a shame mass media doesn't have a better grasp on what they're talking about when they're talking about viruses... this one article is being picked up by a number of tech related news sites, spreading this rubbish far and wide...